Sergio Lerner, head of the innovation department at IOV Labs and developer of the RSK platform, explained how the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined his first million bitcoins. The research found that the miner could have used a multithreaded hashing method not included in the earliest version of the client.
Lerner refers to the miner as ‘Patoshi’, as there is not enough evidence that he truly is Satoshi Nakamoto. The researcher first wrote about the mysterious bitcoin-mining scheme back in March 2013.
Privacy flaws in the source code of the first cryptocurrency allowed him to discover an unknown mining method. The gist of the method is that Patoshi’s mining code increased the extraNonce field differently from the Bitcoin client’s default code.
For seven years, Lerner sought to uncover Patoshi’s true motives, as well as the method by which the miner could have mined the first million coins, currently valued at about $12.65 billion. In the course of the study, Lerner put into practice his long-held idea: to model the mining of the first 18,000 blocks in hopes of obtaining new data about early mining.
Ultimately, he concluded that Patoshi used a multithreaded hashing method. This approach allowed him to search multiple nonce values concurrently to mine a new block. It is estimated that Patoshi could have used around 50 CPUs, or a single processor with threading extension.
“Patoshi used a more powerful system than the others. Not because he had a supercomputer, but because he used his computer more efficiently,” the researcher said during a conversation with CoinDesk.
Lerner noted that Patoshi’s mining method was ‘the opposite of Satoshi’s v0.1 client’, the original mining software released with Bitcoin Core 0.1.0. In fact, the multithreading Patoshi employed was not integrated into the Bitcoin mining script until 2010.
In June, Lerner noted that Patoshi “reduced the hashrate during the first year.” It is quite possible that he turned off his miner for five-minute intervals each time he mined a new block.
Patoshi took these measures, Lerner argues, to foster healthy competition and ensure that he did not monopolise all new blocks. Conversely, he may have used multithreading in the early days to keep the network going, compensating for blocks not being mined on schedule.
“I support the idea that Patoshi cared about network security far more than the number of bitcoins mined. It seems he turned on his miner only when the network was not producing blocks at the expected rate. Patoshi also deliberately reduced the hashrate several times to allow other miners to mine more blocks when he believed there were enough miners in the network,” Lerner said.
As Whale Alert notes, the bitcoins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto were estimated.
Subscribe to ForkLog news on Telegram: ForkLog FEED — the full news feed, ForkLog — the most important news and polls.